by Azadeh Amirsadri
In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, my maternal grandmother spent a lot of time in the United States. She would return to Iran, her suitcase filled with presents like candy and fruity bubble gum for her grandchildren, and pretty shirts and dresses for our mom. She also brought back a part of her daily American life: cartons of red Winston cigarettes, Crest toothpaste, hand and face creams with English writings on the bottles, and Dial Soap in that beautiful saffron gold color that was unlike any soap I had seen or smelled before. Our soaps in Iran were usually either flower scented and over perfumed, or green and organic because of the local olive oil used to make them. Everyone valued the green soaps, but I just wanted the American gold soap. I would watch her put the soap back in a plastic container after her shower to keep it from drying and when she was away from her room, I would go open the plastic container and smell the magic of that gold bar of soap.
In the summer of 1975, when I was 16 years old and a rising junior in high school, I fell in love with a young man who was a college student. We had a standing date every Thursday where he was off from his internship at an architectural firm and didn’t have to attend classes at the university; and me, damn any class that was going to stand in my way of keeping me away from him. Every Wednesday evening, I would take my grandmother’s soap, go in the shower and rub my body with that gold Dial. The next day, I skipped school to hang out with him, first in parks and coffee shops, eventually graduating to stairwells where we would kiss frantically, but faced the danger of getting caught. Then when he finally could afford it, he bought a Citroen Deux-Chevaux, and would pick me up from school where we had the whole city of Tehran to ourselves. We’d go to dark restaurants that were so popular in the 1970’s where you could make out under the cover of semi- darkness, especially after over tipping the doorman. We’d go outside the city and walk around talking about our scorching love and how no one has ever known this type of love, no one ever will and how lucky we were to have created this magical connection.
My Thursdays during the school year were wrapped in the loving perfume of his sweet words and the faint scent of my grandmother’s American soap.
Another thing my grandmother talked about was the food in America; specifically, bubble gum, cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes. On summer evenings, as we were sleeping on the flat rooftop of our house where we could catch a breeze in the dry oppressive summer heat of Tehran, my grandmother would tell us about Americans with big cars, driving for a long time to go to a park or to climb a mountain and once there, they would eat a cheeseburger, hang out and drive back home. I imagined guys with long hair, wearing jeans, and women wearing brightly colored sleeveless dresses with red lipstick on, laughing in their cars with open widows and the wind in their hair.
The best part of the stories though were the detailed descriptions of things I could not even imagine, like banana splits. My grandmother, who was very good at stretching these tales, told us about ice cream in America. Not a cone or even a dish, but a long boat of a dish, with a banana cut lengthwise in half, with three different types of ice cream, all in a store where they were so many choices of flavor that choosing three would take a very long time, yet it was all acceptable and no one rushed you.
As my sisters and I laid there, holding our breaths trying to simply imagine such glory, she would describe how the toppings were added, one by one, all crowned with whipped cream and cherries. I had seen pictures of such delights and imagined them to be an out of this world experience. She said banana splits were better than Cafe Glacé, our favorite iced coffee and ice cream drink, because you could chose any flavor you wanted or combine flavors. As we asked for more details, she’d just laugh and go to her bedroom, leaving us hungry for more and telling us she will share more with us the following day.
When I left Iran for the United States in 1976, one of the nuns in my Catholic school told me it would be America’s bicentennial celebration. She was the only American nun we had and unlike the other European nuns who wore long habits, she wore a knee length one and there was something light about her demeanor. Maybe it was her age, or just who she was. She said I was so lucky to be going to America and participating in the bicentennial festivities. I was 17 years old and had no idea what she was talking about. Iran had celebrated 2500 years of royal history a few years before, so 200 years didn’t make much sense to me. I was more interested in the cheeseburgers and banana splits than any bicentennials. My then husband and I would go to the Navy commissary every weekend. I would dress up very nicely, wear my wedding jewelry, put on lavender eye shadow and lipstick that matched my purple dress and go to lunch at McDonald’s after grocery shopping. We’d each get a Big Mac meal with a coke and as I’d sit there watching people and children in and out of the restaurant, I’d marvel at my luck for being able to eat this amazing food that my grandmother talked about. I missed my sisters a lot though and wanted them to be with me, experiencing this joy I was experiencing.
The banana splits I eventually had never tasted as good as the ones my grandmother talked about. Her descriptions and my imagination were way better than the reality, as things usually are.
The soap though is still as good. My daughter and her family were visiting two years ago from California and my son-in-law went and got me some fancy soaps in cute crafty paper as a gift after he took a shower at my house and decided I needed to upgrade my bathing routine. After they left, I brought my own Dial soap back into circulation because the smell gives me that distant feeling of being pampered, naughty and oh so in love.